To get this cleared beforehand, I will post my biases. I generally hope that Russia will choke on Ukraine. The relationship between Russia and the US is far too poisoned now for any sort of anti-Chinese alliance to happen within a generation. All that said, Ukraine *is* losing, be how much and how hard is very difficult to determine, and in my own personal opinion, the situation looks extremely grim for the Ukrainian state.
I'm going to post much of what we can really can and have learned about the war and technical capabilities. Which is to say, not very much.
We have an extremely hard time judging Russian performance because of several factors:
1. Russian OPSEC being extremely tight for front/war footage. A person can tell a great difference between main Russian forces and the breakaway republic forces by the gulf of informational difference being put out by the two groups.
2. We don't know original and current Russian war aims. Any claim of "the Russians are performing well below their own expectations" is (at best) unverifiable.
3. It's a fucking ongoing war. The only people who are going to have a decent idea of what is going on is the respective force commanders, and even they are going to be getting a seriously flawed picture of both their own, and enemy forces.
So what can we glean?
1. The Javelin seems to penetrate every piece of armor it has successfully hit. Infantry carried weapons have utility against even the heaviest armor.
2. Drone warfare capabilities seem to outstrip capabilities of shooting them down. This is not a problem unique to Russia by any means. The Saudi's being equipped quite well with US AA systems have had quite a bit of trouble with drones relatively primitive drones. The Israelis have some issues as well despite having the densest, most advances air-defense in the middle east, against 70s era tech Iranian drones.
3. Helicopter gunships of the Mi-* series seem to be increasingly outmoded and irrelevant deathtraps for the combat roll. It seems like they have been effectively grounded on both sides because of the strong SHORAD capabilities of both sides.
4.Russian heavy forces still made up of upgraded mid-late cold war equipment. This really doesn't surprise, as much the overwhelming amount of the Russian defense budget for the better part of the last decade went to updating and upgrading Russian nuclear capabilities. The remaining budget couldn't cover the cost of both large scale production of new equipment and maintaining force readiness. It reminds me a lot of the 1970s US "Hollow Force" problems.
5. Given the near complete lack of propaganda footage of Ukrainian armored forces, it appears safe to assume that their armored forces have been largely irrelevant or performing very poorly. Also rather expected, Tanks don't do well if you don't have the capability to heavily contest the air-war.
6.Despite heavy Russian air advantage, Ukrainian drone capabilities seem able to continue operations at some level.
7. Russian doctrine and military still rely heavily upon artillery capability and support.
_
Beyond the above, what do we know? not much, and even the above is quite subject to change.
